Into the Web (5 page)

I gave no response, though what Lonnie said was true enough. Not a single day had gone by in the twenty years that had passed since I’d last seen Lila that I hadn’t thought of her. I’d angrily tossed out the few pictures I had of her, discarded her letter, thrown away even the slightest memento of the time we’d spent together, and yet she’d haunted me through the years. The sight of a wildflower could bring her back, but I’d glimpsed her, too, at ball games and soda fountains, heard her laugh behind me in a darkened movie theater.

“With me it’s Charlotte,” Lonnie said. “Charlotte Bethune. You remember her, don’t you?”

I did. She’d never raised her hand in class or uttered a single memorable word, but despite all that, Charlotte Bethune had given off the unmistakable scent of ripe sexuality, a red, swollen cherry of a girl.

“Charlotte Bethune,” Lonnie repeated, like he could taste her name in his mouth. “Married Randy LaFavor. Moved to Oklahoma. Probably got six kids by now. Probably weighs a ton.” He laughed. “The girl a boy dreams of never grows old, never gets fat. She just sits there in your brain, like time couldn’t touch her. Perfect.”

In my mind I saw us on the old mining road, a young couple, hand in hand, walking slowly in the darkness, thinking only of each other until the first roar of the motor
sounded distantly, then the first glimpse of the truck’s yellow lights, heading toward us out of the night.

“Must have been tough, losing Lila,” Lonnie added after a moment, still the prying teenager I remembered from my youth, still picking for some unseemly detail or hint of injury, the pain of others like honey on his tongue.

When I didn’t respond, he turned back toward the road, then thrust the gear into second as we mounted the last remaining hill. “There it is,” he said after we’d come over its rounded crest.

Lila’s place sat at the edge of a wide pasture, an unpainted farmhouse with a high tin roof, discolored by long runnels of rust. A green tractor with worn wheels was parked beside a large wooden shed, the mud-caked blades of its metal tiller drooping heavily to the ground behind it. A dusty black pickup was parked beside it, nearly treadless tires spattered with mud, the front bumper slumped to the right like a shattered shoulder.

“Looks like things haven’t improved much for Lila.” Lonnie pressed on the brake, brought us to a halt in the driveway. He peered at the pasture that swept out from behind the house, goldenrod weaving softly in the breeze. His gaze shifted to the house, taking in its dilapidated state, the rusty tools gathered in a large tub at the bottom of the wooden stairs, the ancient washing machine that sat near the edge of the porch, an oily rag dangling from its hand-cranked wringer. “Lila’s sure not living at the top of the pile.”

“She never did,” I said, recalling how raw her poverty had been, the few home-made dresses she’d had, the single pair of shoes.

Lonnie grabbed the door handle. “You coming?”

“No. I’ll wait here.”

“You don’t want to say hello to your old flame?”

“No.”

Lonnie grinned. “Still pissed at her, Roy? Or just afraid to see what time can do?”

From behind the dust-smeared windshield, I watched as Lonnie strode across the nearly barren lawn, moving briskly up the wooden stairs, then rapped harshly at the door, as if he’d brought an arrest warrant for Lila rather than news of Clayton Spivey’s death.

The door opened, but I couldn’t see who opened it, only the suggestion of a slender figure poised at the entrance of the darkened house.

“Hey there, Lila,” I heard Lonnie say as he stepped inside the house, leaving the door open behind him.

Across the pasture, the forest rose in a tangled barricade of green. In the hard white light, an old mule stood, head down, nosing through the high grass. A line of unpainted fence posts stretched the length of the field, strung with drooping strands of rusted wire. At the edge of the yard an orange tabby hunkered down, belly low, eyes fixed on the small sparrow that hopped obliviously a yard away.

Even now, after having been away from it for so long, I could feel Waylord’s heaviness, dense and blinding, a pull of the earth that grounded everything, turned the most feathery wings into sheets of lead. It didn’t surprise me that even Lila, for all her spirit and determination, had finally been held in place by the iron grip of
these hills. Escape for a man had been hard enough, but for a woman, it was impossible.

The slap of a screen door brought my gaze back to the house.

Lonnie was on the porch. Through the screen, the woman behind it was no more than a hint of white behind rusty brown filament.

After a moment he nodded silently, then strode down the stairs and walked swiftly toward the car, his gait bearing no sign of the dark news he’d just delivered.

“Well, that’s done,” he said as he pulled himself behind the wheel, hit the ignition, and thumped the car into reverse. “Didn’t say much. Not much of a talker, Lila.”

I glanced toward the house. Lila no longer stood behind the screen.

“I told her that we’d take Clayton’s body down to the funeral home in Kingdom City,” Lonnie said as we angled back onto the road. “She said she’d come down and identify the body. You know, officially.” He pressed down on the accelerator, and the shack drifted back like a small boat on a deep green tide. “Didn’t see her mama. I guess her health’s failing.”

A small, round woman, as I recalled her, curiously voluptuous, though in her forties she had seemed ancient to me at the time.

We were moving down the road now, jostling along its narrow ruts.

“As for Lila, she just stood there with her arms folded,” Lonnie said. “You know how she is. Can’t get more than a one-word answer out of that girl.”

Her voice raced through my mind, fervent, full of spirit, certain that with her the cycle would be broken, all the poverty and blighted hope of those who’d come before her.
I’m going to find a way out of Waylord, Roy. You need to find one too.

Until then, I thought I had.

Chapter Four

M
y father was sitting in his bed when I got back to the house, his hair in its usual disarray, the bed’s one sheet wadded up and hurled into a corner.

“Where you been, Roy?” he asked sharply.

“With Lonnie Porterfield.”

“What business you got with him?”

“I don’t have any business with him. I just paid a visit.”

“Mighty long visit.”

“We got caught up in something.”

“His wife left him, you know.” My father said it with satisfaction. “Ain’t no woman had nothing to do with him since then.”

My father’s pleasure at Lonnie’s failed marriage struck me as purely malicious, as if his own unhappy
marriage could find comfort only in the knowledge that other marriages had been no less stricken.

“Probably didn’t give a damn about him by the time she left,” my father added. “Probably raised his hand to her and that’s why she left him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“ ’Cause that’s the way they are, them Porterfields.” Before I could respond, he added, “Got a skinny little daughter that works at the Crispy Cone. Wild as hell, I heard.”

“Who tells you all this, Dad?”

He appeared to resent the question. “I keep track of things.”

“The Porterfields in particular, it seems.”

“What do you care who I keep track of?”

“I don’t, but—”

“Just people in books, them’s the only ones you take an interest in.”

I picked up the sheet, began folding it. “You have any preference for supper?”

“Preference,” my father said, as if the word were too fancy to be uttered in his presence, lay like a silk shirt on his rough back. He plucked a magazine from the table beside his bed, the tattered remnant of something called
Boxing News.
“Just a glass of lemonade.”

For a moment, I peered at him wonderingly, as I had when I was a boy, still vaguely yearning to uncover that part of him that remained deep and unfathomable, and yet sometimes broke the surface, like the black fin of a shark.

He glanced up from the page. “What is it?” he barked, looking me dead in the eye.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He returned to his magazine. “Put lots of ice in that lemonade,” he snapped. “And lots of sugar.” With that he rolled onto his side, purposely giving me his back.

I went to the kitchen, pulled out one of the old jelly jars my mother had used for glasses, this one painted with bright red cherries. She’d called it her “collection,” and pretended it had value, when, in fact, it had served only to demonstrate how little we’d had, “collections” of plates, twine, tinfoil, paper bags, a bounty of want and scarcity.

Most of what she’d gathered together had been lost since her death, so that now the old wooden cabinet contained only a few glasses and a short stack of chipped plates. Drawers that had once overflowed with match-books, buttons, rubber bands, were now very nearly empty. As for her clothes, my father had burned them in a ragged pile the day after her funeral, poking it idly with a stick as the stinking smoke curled upward into a washed-out sky.

I took the old pitcher my grandmother had given her as a wedding gift, mixed water, sugar, bottled lemon juice, then plucked an ice tray from the refrigerator, held it under running water, tapped the cubes into the pitcher.

My father now sat Indian-style, staring out the window, spidery blue veins on naked legs so white they seemed never to have been touched by sun.

“Here’s your lemonade,” I told him.

“You put in plenty of sugar?”

“Until the water wouldn’t dissolve any more.”

He took the glass, raised it above his head, studied the layer of white granules that rested at its bottom, then took a long swig, tucked the glass between his legs, and glanced toward the window again. “You sure you want to stay till the end, Roy? Till I’m dead.”

“I told you I would.”

He took another swig of lemonade, his eyes following the flight of a crow over the pasture. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t.”

He took another sip, lowered the glass into his lap. “Sometime before fall, then. That ain’t long, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“I heard somewhere that a bug lives about a month.” He laughed, his yellow teeth showing briefly, several chipped and crooked, treated with the same indifference with which he’d treated everything else. “I got about the same time as a bug, right, Roy?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He looked at me irritably. “That the way you answer them schoolkids you teach? Can’t just say ‘I don’t know.’ Got to say it fancy. ‘I wouldn’t know.’”

“It’s just a way of speaking, Dad.”

“Teacher talk, that’s what it is.”

He’d always been contemptuous of my work, considered it fit only for old maids, my being a teacher offering yet more evidence that there was something missing in me, the main part of a man. He’d never encouraged my early ambition to go to college, nor taken any pride in the fact that I’d finally gotten a degree. But now he seemed at war with everything I had become since leaving Waylord, not only my choice of career, the fact that I
lived on the other side of the country, but with my grammar, my vocabulary, everything.

But I also knew that something else was going on in him, old demons clawing at his mind, my “fancy” language merely the grappling hook that had dragged something more unsettling from the swamp.

He drained the last of the lemonade and shoved the empty glass toward me. “Anyway, when it comes to dying, I’d rather go like a bug. Not thinking about it.” His eyes drifted toward the old ball bat that rested at a slant against his bed and which he’d begun to use to lift himself from the bed. “One thing’s for damn sure,” he said, now fingering its handle, “you won’t see me go out like Archie done.”

So that was it, I thought. He was thinking about Archie, his life and death pressing like a red-hot iron against his flesh.

“Crack like Archie done. Pissing and moaning.”

In an instant, I recalled my brother during the only time my father had gone to see him in the county jail. He’d been taken completely unaware by the seizure that had left Archie balled up and whimpering on the concrete floor of his cell, my father nudging him with his boot, demanding that he get up, his eyes whipping back and forth from Archie’s crumpled body to where Wallace Porterfield stood just outside the bars, arms folded over his huge chest, a look of absolute contempt in his eyes.

“Shaking all over,” my father muttered. His mouth took a cruel twist. “Life ain’t worth it. If I could turn it off, just like that light switch there, I’d do it right now. It don’t mean a thing to me.”

“It’s different when you’re young. When you have some life left.”

His eyes slashed over to me. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that Archie wasn’t like you, Dad. He wasn’t ready to die. It’s different when you’re young.”

“No, it ain’t,” my father snapped. “It ain’t no different at all. It don’t matter, young or old. You’re the same man facing it all the way through. You know why? ’Cause a man don’t never change. Take you, Roy. You ain’t changed one bit since you was a kid. You still got that same look on your face. Looking down your nose. At everything. This here place. Me.”

“I don’t look down my nose at you, Dad.”

My father laughed. “Oh, you’re nice about it. You don’t say nothing. But I can see it, Roy. What you really think. That I’m just some old ignorant bastard from the hills. But let me tell you something, they’s things I know that you ain’t got no idea about. Things you believe that I ain’t never believed. Stupid things.”

“Like what?”

He started to blurt out something, then held it back.

“Like what?” I said again.

“Like no matter how much you got, they ain’t nothing to it if you ain’t got nobody along with you.”

I had no doubt as to where this was going, another assault upon my failure to produce a family, even one as doomed and miserable as his own.

“I live alone because I want to,” I said, then got to my feet. I was halfway to the door when he drew me back with a question.